New year, new tech, new possibilities!

2017 brought lots of advances for Augmented Reality because of the launch of Apple and Google's new AR tools. Plus, there has been exciting progress on the data side too! Our dev team is pushing what is possible with this new tech and how it can aid wildlife storytelling. Take a look behind the scenes at what we are creating!

We can now make animals appear at their real-life size and speedYou might have heard that Cheetahs can reach a speed of 60 miles per hour, but you don't really know how fast that is, until you see a cheetah take off and run to the end of your street!

We can ditch the scanning targetsOnly eight months ago, in order for our AR animals to walk straight on a floor, street or other surface, we needed users to scan a target like a banknote or logo. With the new technology, we will be able to bring the animals to life without hassle, when inspiration strikes. Like it did on Christmas Day in Uhuru Park, Nairobi.

We have more ways than ever to show the majesty of natureWith markerless, real-life sized versions of the natural world, we have more ways than ever to show people who might never be able to go on a safari, or visit an ancient forest, how precious the natural world is. The majesty of a redwood tree becomes all too real when you can find one on your doorstep.

If you want to dive deeper into what we think AR can do for conservation, we wrote an entire essay about it for Scientific American.

We can now transpose real animal data onto your cityWe can make the movements of animals much more comprehensible and fun by taking the data from real wildlife and transposing it on any city. Take for instance Mweturia the elephant. This old bull living in Kenya walks a distance comparable to the length of Manhattan every day, but can go as far as the distance from London to Birmingham if he has to!

What's next?

We are currently building the gamified version of Safari Central with this new tech, and we'll release an "MVP" which we plan to release early spring. We'd love for you all to be involved in testing it, and we will reach out to recruit testers in specific locations across the world when we have the product ready. After the MVP testing, we will start adding more animals to the mix, increasing features, and improving production values to introduce the full game. Thanks for following us on this journey!